Ubisoft's big reorg, critics and mobile's reputation problem, PGC London thoughts, more

Hello and welcome to the mobile gamer.biz digest. I'm Neil Long and every week I go for a walk and tell you what's happening in the mobile games industry. Here we go. The big industry news of the week is of course the Ubisoft reorganization. This seems to have been going on for a little while already. We've already seen layoffs in Ubisoft Abu Dhabi, the closure of Ubisoft Halifax, and now it has told investors exactly what's going on. It is effectively splitting into five creative houses. The one of most interestamer.biz readers and listeners is of course the mobile arm. That is creative house 5. Last on the billing, mobile uh not a priority for Ubisoft as ever, but it effectively means Ketchup, Calibri, Just Dance, The Hungry Shark Games, Uno,

Ubisoft's licensed Hasbro games, and Invincible Guarding the Globe will all move into this creative house, One Division, designed to cater to casual and mobile players. As I've noted in the article, Rainbow 6 mobile and The Division Resurgence are not mentioned. You would imagine The Division and Rainbow 6 mobile games will live with their big brother PC and console versions. They don't seem very casual. So, you would imagine they will belong in those other creative houses. The way the wider business is split is Vantage Studios, which is the bit that Tencent owns the most of. We'll run Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow 6 games. There's a shooter division, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, The Division. There's other live games, Brawl Hala, For Honor, The Crew, Riders Republic,

and a fantasy/narrative creative house, Anna, Rayman, Prince of Persia, Might and Magic. There's a few associated mobile games out there. under those brands, too. So, we'll see how all this shakes out. It's pure speculation at this point, but Ubisoft does say that it will continue to quote consider potential asset divevestages, which means everything's up for sale. And really those games in that mobile division outside of Just Dance, which is a Ubisoft owned property and still pretty successful. Do the Ketchup games fit into what Ubisoft is now? Calibri, Hungry Shark. All three of those don't really fit into any of the other creative houses and might be a nice acquisition for someone out there looking to build a portfolio of existing successful games. You would

imagine also, this is pure speculation, but you would imagine Ubisoft is maybe not monetizing those games as hard as a Scopely or a another more mobile native game company would monetize those games. So I would predict that Ketchup, Calibri, maybe Hungry Shark will get snapped up by someone else if Ubisoft wants to divest. It has licensing agreements in place with Mattel for Uno, various licensed Hasbro games and Invincible Guarding the Globe, which is a comic book franchise. So, you would imagine those license games will stay put because of the nature of the agreements with the license holders. But yeah, elsewhere in that restructure article, there's confirmation that one mobile game has been cancelled. We don't know what that is. And looking forward, there

will be a further €200 million in cost reductions over the next two years. So inevitably further layoffs to come at Ubisoft across PC, console and mobile. CEO Eve Gilmo said of the restructure. It's a turning point refocus. It's going to damage its short-term financial health, but long-term this will reset renew the company. quote, "Ubisoft is entering a new phase, one designed to reclaim creative leadership and build value for players and stakeholders over the long term." So, yes, I don't think anyone's surprised by this news, but yeah, probably a difficult time to be working at Ubisoft. So, I sympathize with the people there not knowing if they're going to be on the chopping

block if their game will be sold off or closed. Like I say, those Calibbri Hungry Hungry Shark Ketchup games seem like obvious candidates for divevestature, but we will see. Never a dull moment at Ubisoft. I'm sure there will be further rounds of layoffs and cancellations and things like that as the next two years of cost reductions unfold. Let's look on the positive side. Hopefully, some of those games and mobile brands will find a new home and they will continue. I've called this week critics week, but as you may have noticed on social media, I've also called it game writers actually writing about mobile games week as well. Whatever you want to call it. I commissioned five different games writers to actually write about mobile games for once because my sort of

working theory on games writers is that they may not cover mobile games professionally, but they're all playing mobile games daily like the rest of us. And that turned out to be true. So, I got Keith Stewart, Nicole Carpenter, Tom Reagan, Chris Scullion, and Christian Donlin to write about the mobile games they play every day. And they wrote about Spell Tower, Disney Solitaire, Suika Game, Pokémon, TCG Pocket, and Marvel Snap. All very entertaining pieces of writing. Not super industry focused, but it's the middle of January outside of Ubisoft. the news cycle has not kicked fully into gear yet. And also, I've been working on a couple of different stories that haven't quite come to fruition. And on top of that, there was PTC London as well. So, I felt like this was a good week to experiment,

try something different. But a running theme, I think, you know, mobile games will not escape accusations of being predatory, cynical, rinsing players for everything they've got. I think the most prominent example of this is Chris Scullion. He writes in a really entertaining fashion about the sort of lovehate relationship he has with Disney Solitaire. How his collector brain has prompted him to spend quite a lot of money on that game but not really feel like he wanted to. And it's an interesting dilemma, isn't it? where we all want mobile games to be successful from a business point of view and anyone buying an inapp purchase, we want them to feel good about that. But I think Chris nicely sums up the alternate side of that where he's paying to complete

things, complete collections, complete parts of Disney Solitaire that he doesn't feel that great about. I think it's also notable that Tom when he writes about Pokemon TCG Pocket, he writes about spending money on new packs and he's he's actually quite happy to do that. It's his collector's brain again. the other games, Suka game, Spell Tower, Marvel Snap, you know, Spell Tower, Suka Game, premium games. There's no dark side of monetization really with those titles. But Don Lern writes beautifully about Marvel Snap and says he's felt really good about spending money on the game because he enjoys it so much. As a side note, the day I published the article from Nicole about Suka Game, a podcast I listened to, Ellison and John, it's on the BBC, one of the hosts on

that show. What really went off on one about Suka Game, John Robbins, he's a British comedian. He has talked before about his addictions to mobile games and he talks about fake ads. He's playing a Boggle game, which I assume is the Zingga one and he keeps seeing this ad for Suka game, and was roped in by the playable ad and then went to the App Store and tried to find the original game rather than the many clones on the app store, paid up front for the game, and is now addicted to Suka game. He talks about the last war, user acquisitions, lane running ads, and it's all kind of pretty negative. Yeah, I think an interesting week in terms of getting a wider view of how mobile games are perceived. I think it's good to seek out what regular people think about mobile games. Sometimes it's not great, sometimes it's

fine. I think the mobile games industry does have a long way to go in terms of fixing its reputation, but maybe it's not a reputation that can be fixed and we should just not worry about it too much. You are halfway through the podcast. Here is a commercial break. I'll be back after this. Exola connects developers with the resources they need to build, fund, launch, and monetize their mobile games globally. With Exola Web Shop, sell virtual items, in-game currency, subscriptions, and custom offers directly to players while driving up to five times the revenue growth. With the industry's number one web shop solution, Exola provides the tools for developers to focus on what's most important, creating great games. Visit exola.com to learn more. That's xsol.com. Most of my audience were at Pocket Gaming Connects London this week, hence the experiment with game writers writing

more broadly about their experiences with mobile games. And yeah, Pocky Gaming Connects, I mean, I was around the outskirts of the event. In the first couple of years of running mobile gamer.biz, I was there with a press pass writing up talks and things like that. But in recent years, I figured that actually the pocketgamer.biz team do a pretty good job of writing up their own talks and I don't really need to just do the same work as them but on a different website. So, it's more valuable for me to talk to people in the business, talk to commercial partners, get a sense of how everyone's feeling. I would say the doom and gloom days are not quite over, but of the people I spoke to around the show, Monday and Tuesday seems to be pretty positive, Appcharge and Exola

very much duking it out in terms of attention in the web shop space. Appch charge had a pile of shredded money in the coat restaurant over the road from the venue. Exola, I'm told, had a big flashy stand at the show itself. And yeah, that's quite good fun to watch. Two companies going at it aggressively, fighting it out for market share. the other web shop companies. Stash has gone a little quiet, hasn't it? That was once quite a prominent brand in that space. I think the other guys in that world going about their business in a sort of more B2B, less public fashion. Craig on pocketgamer.biz is did a good summary of the UK creative council or whatever it's called talk featuring Sard

from Mini Clip and others on government support for the mobile games industry and games industry at large. You know, it's not a surprise to find the UK government offering nowhere near the kind of support that the Turkish government or Vietnamese government, for example, are offering to their game developers. The UK government, I think, has a fair amount going on already trying to deal with the orange tyrant Trump as well as various other crises. I think a Labor government will always be inclined to help people who are struggling versus boosting things that are already pretty successful. and the UK games industry is already pretty successful without a huge amount of help. So, I can't see that changing too soon. Read Craig's article about what was said there. I think the

headline is something like, "If I had to start a new 100 person studio, I wouldn't start in the UK," which is pretty damning, but perhaps no surprise. There's also a good newsletter, the video game industry memo from George Osborne. He is the video game and politics guy. He has a newsletter that talks about this in a little bit more detail as well. Outside of that, I met some people doing some really interesting in terms of community development. a couple of new studios spinning out of other very large existing mobile game studios. I met some contemporaries in the media. Also went to a fancy party at Soho House from Appcharge, but uh I don't I don't drink and I'm old, so that was more a quick chat with some people I recognized and then it was

back home again. But um yes, a good event. I will leave you with probably the biggest thing that everyone I spoke to was talking about. There is a report coming out on that on Monday. I'll leave you with that little tease. Keep an eye on the site and your inboxes on Monday when I will drop that report. And I think it might get a lot of people talking. In the regulars this week, soft launch on Monday had news of two new additions from Moon Active, some new games from Triple Dot, plus the usual soft launch titles from Playrex, Roio, Zingga, Supercell, Mini Clips, SE Super, and more. And then on Wednesday data, there's Monopoly Go, which according to Sensor Tower hit $6 billion. There's a

breakdown of those numbers in that article. Tail monster Turkish studio gets $30 million. Appsfly report states that UA spend has hit 25 billion in the last year. some live ops analysis, web shop stats, plus download and revenue milestones for say games, love and deep space, arc nights, e e football and hill climb racing and sensor towers state of mobile report came out just as I published that. So there will be a breakdown of that in next week's data digest. There's also the new games digest which gets forgotten about in this podcast. That's my bad. It runs every Friday. So, it gets written up and published after I record this. And the previous week's entry is maybe too long ago to mention, but I think it's notable that Subway

Surfers City launched One Punch Man World, which had a huge stand at Gamescom seemed to be positioning itself as a Genchin Impact contender. That's closed down already. Roio has partnered with French studio OBB to create a Angry Birds luck battle game. So, you would imagine a Super Play Moon Active style game. And there's loads of other stuff in there. But yeah, that new game digest article that goes out every Friday really got a solid readership now, which is really good to see. That's the podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you for persevering with some drilling and train noises in the background. Also, on the footpath I've been walking on this morning, a guy with a moped just absolutely caned it

past which felt illegal. I'm not sure if it was, but that was thrilling. Speak to you next week.